State of Framing: Why Biden’s Message at the SOTU isn't enough

As predicted, Tuesday night’s #SOTU address included a lot about the economy’s bounceback – facts and figures about unprecedented job growth, and reassurances about cooling inflation. But the elephant in that big, occasionally raucous room was that as hard as the President touted progress and great gains made, most people aren’t buying it.?

The reality is that despite this administration’s economic successes—12 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment rate in more than 50 years, somewhat-sane prices at the pump—our current state doesn’t feel like progress to most people. And, importantly, even if people can see that things might be looking slightly better, they aren’t attributing it to anything the government is doing.?

Biden’s approval rating continues to hover in the low 40s and nearly two-thirds of Americans think he’s accomplished “not very much” or “little or?nothing” during his time in the Oval Office. Will the long list of accomplishments he touted during last night’s speech change that? We think it’s highly unlikely, and here’s why.

Through the Culture Change Project, we’re tracking a few mindsets that might help explain why recent policy reforms aren’t finding their way into the thinking of most Americans…and why a SOTU speech laced with these accomplishments is unlikely to make a whole lot of difference:

1. Fatalism is strong. 20+ years of FrameWorks research tells us that people are quick to look at systemic social problems as issues that are too big to solve. It gets worse when government is mentioned as the actor doing the solving—at that point, people’s eyes glaze over and they just stop listening. What could government of all things do to help fix something like inflation or unemployment (much less poverty or racism)??
2. People believe the system is rigged. To be clear, in many ways it is. But our research shows that we as a public are not entirely clear on what we mean by the system, who is rigging it, or to what end. We are sure, though, that it’s working for some to the detriment of others. And we are very quick to put government—and especially its leaders—into the role of problem-creators, making us totally skeptical that government is capable of doing things that actually fix problems.?
3. Americans have a highly person-centric view of government. Our research also shows that Americans tend to view government not as a complex system of rules, policies, actors, and institutions, but as a collection of individual leaders (or a set of good guys and bad guys—mainly bad guys). Again, it’s hard to see how individual actors (who most people think of as corrupt and skullduggerous) could be affecting the systems that are creating inflation and fueling violence.?

Taken together, these ways of thinking make it really hard for us to connect government action to anything good that’s happening. If we think the government is full of a bunch of bad-faith actors, that they are rigging things against us, and that our problems are too big to solve, nothing that anyone says—especially in a highly produced, highly political State of the Union address—is going to make much of a difference.?

If Americans are ever going to fully appreciate the power the government has to enact meaningful, systemic change—and recognize when it’s happening—it will be important to continue to investigate how these mindsets play out and the best ways of framing these issues in order to build understanding of what can be accomplished.

Post written by Nat Kendall-Taylor, FrameWorks Institute CEO